inconveniences of a long land transportation.... If this
cannot be made easy for them to Philadelphia...they will seek
a mart elsewhere.... An opposition on the part of [that]
government...would ultimately bring on a separation between
its Eastern and Western settlements; towards which there is not
wanting a disposition at this moment in that part of it beyond
the mountains."

Washington's second proposal was the achievement of a new and
lasting conquest of the West by binding it to the seaboard with
chains of commerce. He thus states his point: "No well informed
mind need be told that the flanks and rear of the United
territory are possessed by other powers, and formidable ones
too--nor how necessary it is to apply the cement of interest to
bind all parts of it together, by one indissoluble
bond--particularly
the middle States with the Country immediately back of them--for
what ties let me ask, should we have upon those people; and how
entirely unconnected should we be with them if the Spaniards on
their right or Great Britain on their left, instead of throwing
stumbling blocks in their way as they do now, should invite their
trade and seek alliances with them?"

Some of the pictures in Washington's vision reveal, in the light
of subsequent events, an almost uncanny prescience. He very
plainly prophesied the international rivalry for the trade of the
Great Lakes zone, embodied today in the Welland and the Erie
canals. He declared the possibility of navigating with oceangoing
vessels the tortuous two-thousand-mile channel of the Ohio and
the Mississippi River; and within sixteen years ships left the